Tr3s Lunas

Tr3s Lunas is a record album written and mostly performed by Mike Oldfield. It was released in 2002 with a bonus CD containing a demo program for a PC game, Tres Lunas.

Background

Title

When translated from the Spanish language to English, the album name Tres Lunas is Three Moons. This is reflected in the typeface on the album cover, with the letter 'e' being replaced with a numeric '3'.

Recording

Oldfield's sister, Sally makes a speaking appearance on this album. The last previous Mike Oldfield album which she had appeared on was 1978's Incantations. The main vocalist for "To Be Free" is the Jazz singer Jude Sim. British-Asian vocalist called Amar, who first appeared on Tubular Bells III, also contributes vocals to the album. The album was recorded at Oldfield's Roughwood Studios, with additional parts recorded at Plan 1 Studios, Munich.

The saxophone sound is played with the use of a guitar synthesizer.

The game

Tres Lunas was the vehicle for Oldfield's first publicly released MusicVR game. It was followed by Maestro. Some of the music from the Tres Lunas game eventually ended up on Oldfield's Light + Shade album.

Tres Lunas (video game)

Tres Lunas (also known as Tr3s Lunas) is a MusicVR video game published in 2002 by British musician Mike Oldfield. The title is Spanish for Three Moons.

History

Oldfield had been working on the idea of melding virtual reality and music throughout the 1990s. Oldfield worked with 3D graphics programmer Colin Dooley and graphic artist Nick Catcheside. The Newlook and Modelworks software packages were used in the creation of the game. Modelworks was used to create the 3D models and Newlook is the game engine, level editor and music sequencer used to create the final game. Both software packages were written by Colin Dooley with Newlook being created specifically for the Music VR project.

2002 saw the release of Oldfield's first new album of the Millennium, entitled Tres Lunas. This was also the first publicly released MusicVR game, also titled Tres Lunas. A demo version of the game came on a second CD packaged with the album, with the full version available for purchase from Oldfield's website. The game has since become available for free. The game featured segments of music from the album Tres Lunas, along with specially composed music. In the game you can fly around the world, collecting a maximum of 7 gold rings, which change the music which you hear. You can also study or manipulate many objects, with various consequences.